The Tragic Muse. Генри Джеймс
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Gabriel Nash, "we've only one life that we know anything about: fancy taking it up with disagreeable impressions! When then shall we go in for the agreeable?"
"What do you mean by the agreeable?" Nick demanded.
"Oh the happy moments of our consciousness—the multiplication of those moments. We must save as many as possible from the dark gulf."
Nick had excited surprise on the part of his sister, but it was now Biddy's turn to make him open his eyes a little. She raised her sweet voice in appeal to the stranger.
"Don't you think there are any wrongs in the world—any abuses and sufferings?"
"Oh so many, so many! That's why one must choose."
"Choose to stop them, to reform them—isn't that the choice?" Biddy asked. "That's Nick's," she added, blushing and looking at this personage.
"Ah our divergence—yes!" Mr. Nash sighed. "There are all kinds of machinery for that—very complicated and ingenious. Your formulas, my dear Dormer, your formulas!"
"Hang 'em, I haven't got any!" Nick now bravely declared.
"To me personally the simplest ways are those that appeal most," Mr. Nash went on. "We pay too much attention to the ugly; we notice it, we magnify it. The great thing is to leave it alone and encourage the beautiful."
"You must be very sure you get hold of the beautiful," said Nick.
"Ah precisely, and that's just the importance of the faculty of appreciation. We must train our special sense. It's capable of extraordinary extension. Life's none too long for that."
"But what's the good of the extraordinary extension if there is no affirmation of it, if it all goes to the negative, as you say? Where are the fine consequences?" Dormer asked.
"In one's own spirit. One is one's self a fine consequence. That's the most important one we have to do with. I am a fine consequence," said Gabriel Nash.
Biddy rose from the bench at this and stepped away a little as to look at a piece of statuary. But she had not gone far before, pausing and turning, she bent her eyes on the speaker with a heightened colour, an air of desperation and the question, after a moment: "Are you then an æsthete?"
"Ah there's one of the formulas! That's walking in one's hat! I've no profession, my dear young lady. I've no état civil. These things are a part of the complicated ingenious machinery. As I say, I keep to the simplest way. I find that gives one enough to do. Merely to be is such a métier; to live such an art; to feel such a career!"
Bridget Dormer turned her back and examined her statue, and her brother said to his old friend: "And to write?"
"To write? Oh I shall never do it again!"
"You've done it almost well enough to be inconsistent. That book of yours is anything but negative; it's complicated and ingenious."
"My dear fellow, I'm extremely ashamed of that book," said Gabriel Nash.
"Ah call yourself a bloated Buddhist and have done with it!" his companion exclaimed.
"Have done with it? I haven't the least desire to have done with it. And why should one call one's self anything? One only deprives other people of their dearest occupation. Let me add that you don't begin to have an insight into the art of life till it ceases to be of the smallest consequence to you what you may be called. That's rudimentary."
"But if you go in for shades you must also go in for names. You must distinguish," Nick objected. "The observer's nothing without his categories, his types and varieties."
"Ah trust him to distinguish!" said Gabriel Nash sweetly. "That's for his own convenience; he has, privately, a terminology to meet it. That's one's style. But from the moment it's for the convenience of others the signs have to be grosser, the shades begin to go. That's a deplorable hour! Literature, you see, is for the convenience of others. It requires the most abject concessions. It plays such mischief with one's style that really I've had to give it up."
"And politics?" Nick asked.
"Well, what about them?" was Mr. Nash's reply with a special cadence as he watched his friend's sister, who was still examining her statue. Biddy was divided between irritation and curiosity. She had interposed space, but she had not gone beyond ear-shot. Nick's question made her curiosity throb as a rejoinder to his friend's words.
"That, no doubt you'll say, is still far more for the convenience of others—is still worse for one's style."
Biddy turned round in time to hear Mr. Nash answer: "It has simply nothing in life to do with shades! I can't say worse for it than that."
Biddy stepped nearer at this and drew still further on her courage. "Won't mamma be waiting? Oughtn't we to go to luncheon?"
Both the young men looked up at her and Mr. Nash broke out: "You ought to protest! You ought to save him!"
"To save him?" Biddy echoed.
"He had a style, upon my word he had! But I've seen it go. I've read his speeches."
"You were capable of that?" Nick laughed.
"For you, yes. But it was like listening to a nightingale in a brass band."
"I think they were beautiful," Biddy declared.
Her brother got up at this tribute, and Mr. Nash, rising too, said with his bright colloquial air: "But, Miss Dormer, he had eyes. He was made to see—to see all over, to see everything. There are so few like that."
"I think he still sees," Biddy returned, wondering a little why Nick didn't defend himself.
"He sees his 'side,' his dreadful 'side,' dear young lady. Poor man, fancy your having a 'side'—you, you—and spending your days and your nights looking at it! I'd as soon pass my life looking at an advertisement on a hoarding."
"You don't see me some day a great statesman?" said Nick.
"My dear fellow, it's exactly what I've a terror of."
"Mercy! don't you admire them?" Biddy cried.
"It's a trade like another and a method of making one's way which society certainly condones. But when one can be something better—!"
"Why what in the world is better?" Biddy asked.
The young man gasped and Nick, replying for him, said: "Gabriel Nash is better! You must come and lunch with us. I must keep you—I must!" he added.
"We shall save him yet," Mr. Nash kept on easily to Biddy while they went and the girl wondered still more what her mother would make of him.
III
After her companions left her Lady Agnes rested for five minutes in silence with her elder daughter, at the end of which time she observed: "I suppose one must have food at any rate," and, getting up, quitted the place where they had been sitting. "And where are we to go? I hate eating out of doors," she went on.
"Dear me, when one comes to Paris—!" Grace returned in a tone apparently implying that in so rash an adventure one must be prepared for compromises and concessions. The two ladies wandered to where they saw a large sign of "Buffet" suspended in the air, entering a precinct reserved for little white-clothed tables, straw-covered chairs and long-aproned waiters. One of these functionaries approached them with eagerness and with a "Mesdames sont seules?" receiving in return from her ladyship the slightly snappish announcement "Non; nous sommes beaucoup!" He introduced them to a table larger than most of the others, and under his protection they took their places at it and began rather languidly and vaguely to consider the question of the repast. The waiter had placed a carte in Lady Agnes's hands and she studied it, through her eye-glass, with a failure of interest, while he enumerated with professional fluency the resources of the establishment and Grace watched the people at the other tables. She was hungry and had already broken a morsel from a long glazed roll.
"Not cold beef and pickles, you know," she observed to her mother. Lady Agnes gave no heed to this profane remark, but dropped her eye-glass and laid down the greasy document. "What does it signify? I daresay it's all nasty," Grace continued; and she